You know, if you told me six years ago that I was going to be floating around in the South China Sea on one of the most powerful warships in the world, I would've called you an idiot. But of course, that's exactly where I found myself.

My time in the Navy up to this point as been pretty uneventful and unexciting, but with my recent assignment to the USS RONALD REAGAN and China stirring things up in an extremely vital area of the Pacific Ocean, my summer turned into 53 straight days of floating around and making it known that we